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| Marvel Tales 1934.05 |
Opening Statement:
In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the seacoast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbor toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky.What in Brown Jenkin's Name..?
A man becomes very fond of visiting Celephais in his dreams. Eventually he becomes an official member of its population.Synopsis:
Kuranes travels to strange distant lands in his dreams, looking for the city of Celephais. He finds it and enjoys it’s lands so much he uses drugs to sleep more and more. Eventually he becomes destitute and homeless. Suddenly he seems to be rescued by the knights of Celephais in medieval times, and is made their god-king in Celephais. In the real world, Kuranes’ body is found, thrown by the sea against the cliff rocks.Essential Saltes:
One night he went flying over dark mountains where there were faint, lone campfires at great distances apart, and strange, shaggy herds with tinkling bells on the leaders, and in the wildest part of this hilly country, so remote that few men could ever have seen it, he found a hideously ancient wall or causeway of stone zigzagging along the ridges and valleys; too gigantic ever to have risen by human hands, and of such a length that neither end of it could be seen. Beyond that wall in the grey dawn he came to a land of quaint gardens and cherry trees, and when the sun rose he beheld such beauty of red and white flowers, green foliage and lawns, white paths, diamond brooks, blue lakelets, carven bridges, and red-roofed pagodas, that he for a moment forgot Celephais in sheer delight. But he remembered it again when he walked down a white path toward a red-roofed pagoda, and would have questioned the people of this land about it, had he not found that there were no people there, but only birds and bees and butterflies. On another night Kuranes walked up a damp stone spiral stairway endlessly, and came to a tower window overlooking a mighty plain and river lit by the full moon; and in the silent city that spread away from the river bank he thought he beheld some feature or arrangement which he had known before. He would have descended and asked the way to Ooth-Nargai had not a fearsome aurora sputtered up from some remote place beyond the horizon, showing the ruin and antiquity of the city, and the stagnation of the reedy river, and the death lying upon that land, as it had lain since King Kynaratholis came home from his conquests to find the vengeance of the gods.From Dr. Armitage's Notes:
- 1st Leng (dream-world version).
- 1st yellow-masked high priest of Leng, Innsmouth.
- Kuranes reappears in “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath”.
- Written in a Dunsanian style.
The Horrible Conclusion:
And Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the neighboring regions of dream, and held his court alternately in Celephais and in the cloud-fashioned Serannian. He reigns there still, and will reign happily for ever, though below the cliffs at Innsmouth the channel tides played mockingly with the body of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn; played mockingly, and cast it upon the rocks by ivy-covered Trevor Towers, where a notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer enjoys the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility.Read it here.
Follow'd by "From Beyond".
